BLAME THE #ABUSER...NOT THE VICTIM of INCEST

Today, I received a cheque payment for my book, "No Tears for my Father". It was accompanied by what was, for me, a heart-breaking note, so heart-breaking in fact, that I felt compelled, after a long silence, to write this blog post.

The purchaser was a woman who found out her husband of many years had been having an ongoing sexual relationship with his daughter from a previous marriage. This lady's world fell apart on learning this ugly truth, and who can blame her? She is now desperately trying to heal and get over this ugliness that she says has just about destroyed her 14-year marriage. Somehow, she feels my book will help. I find myself wondering how it can.

You see, she is furious and angry with the daughter and has banished her from their home. By doing so, it's obvious she blames the daughter for what happened between her and her father when the daughter was an adolescent. The sexual abuse started when the girl was 11 and continued into adulthood, just as mine did.

But here's the thing: it was the daughter who told her about it. Why? Why did she tell her? Did she do it because she wanted to hurt her father's wife? According to this lady, the daughter told her because, yes, she wanted to destroy the marriage. This may be so, and if it is, how horribly sad that this daughter is "in love", as it were, with her father and is now resentful of his wife.

A while back, I talked with a hairdresser who confessed to me that she had been in love with her father who began having sexual relations with her after the death of his wife. She hated herself for liking it, and when her father found a new woman and stopped the sex with his daughter, she tried suicide. When she told me about this, she was still single and unable to have a normal relationship with men, despite therapy. Her father had also passed away in the meantime. She was a broken shell of a woman who gravitated between loving and hating her father.

With her in mind, and now the daughter this lady has thrown out of the house and obviously blames for the entire sexual relationship, I ask the same question I answered for myself years ago: who really is to blame in such a situation? Did these daughters encourage their fathers? Did they ask their fathers to have sex with them when they were pre-pubescent teens? And even if they had, again, which I very much doubt, who is to blame? Who had complete control of the situation? Who should have refused to let such a situation occur and develop over the years to the extent it did that now these daughters were "in love" with their fathers? And if I hadn't been fortunate enough to find a man that I fell in love with, and through whom I found the courage to stand up to my father and get myself out of that loathsome situation, would I have ended up like them? If I believed in God, I'd be praying mighty hard right now for a "no" to that question. The thought disgusts and revolts me.

So now, back to the lady who hopes my book will help her heal. I hope it will but I believe it can only do so if she realizes that when I was that sexually abused teen, I despised what happened to me and fought it every day until I finally got away from my father. That is what she will read about in my book. She will read how my father manipulated and brainwashed me; how I was too fearful of him to fight him or tell on him; how he convinced me that no-one would believe me. And if this lady reads all that and gets it, she might, just might put the blame where it belongs: on the father and not the daughter. Perhaps she will re-think the reason the daughter told her about the incest: perhaps doing so was a plea for help. I'm willing to bet that behind the daughter's admission is yet another very mentally ill victim of incest in need of therapy.

No-one will ever convince me the child is to blame when an adult initiates sex with him/her. No-one! I hope when this lady has finished reading "No Tears for my Father", she will blame the right person: her husband.